Chinua Achebe Quotes

Often I have the impression that I am writing on paper that is already browning in the licks of the flames.

A certain fire pretends to be alive; it awakens. Working its way along the hand as a conductor, it reaches the support and engulfs it; then a leaping spark closes the circle it was to trace, coming back to the eye and beyond.

Them chickens is ash and I'm lotion.

The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.

Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.

Among the notable things about fire is that it also requires oxygen to burn - exactly like its enemy, life. Thereby are life and flames so often compared.

Fire consumes, but cold preserves.

Storms rumble beyond the horizon, and the fires of heaven purge the earth. There is no salvation without destruction, no hope this side of death.

Wood feeds the fire which burns it.

Black smoke, the flickering sister of fire.

purification in fire. public cremation

Over my pile of ashes

You've gotten drunk on so many kinds of wine. Taste this. It won't make you wild. It's fire. Give up, if you don't understand by this time that your living is firewood.

Fire, even if put on head, burns only.

In order to rise From its own ashes A phoenix First Must Burn.

The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for only lasts a brief lifetime, and then there is eternity. Time forever. Millions of worlds are born, evolve, and pass away into nebulous, unmeasured skies; and there is still eternity. Time always. The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever.

With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.

I am ashes where once I was fire.

Fire is a symbol for so much. It's a symbol for change. It's a symbol for destruction. Out of the ashes of that comes an opportunity to start over. It's one of the greatest metaphors in nature that you can possibly lean on, especially as a songwriter. You're trying to describe either something coming to a complete and utter end or something that is in flux, or something that's on the verge of becoming something else.

Alas! that my body, clean and whole, never been corrupted, today must be consumed and burnt to ashes!

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world

Burn, burn tree and fern! Shrivel and scorch! A fizzling torch To light the night for our delight, Ya hey! Bake and toast ‘em, fry and roast ‘em! till beards blaze, and eyes glaze; till hair smells and skins crack, fat melts, and bones black in cinders lie beneath the sky! So dwarves shall die, and light the night for our delight, Ya hey! Ya-harri-hey! Ya hoy!